AT Salon.com, Ryan Brown reviews a new book by Stan Cox, "Losing our Cool." The topic is air conditioning. It inefficiently keeps us cool, but there are quite a few negatives that we need to consider:

We stay inside longer, exercise less, and get sick more often — and the electricity used to power all that A.C. is helping push the fast-forward button on global warming. The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century.